…that I turned 32 today and it was a nice birthday. Attended a congressional briefing on transportation and development alternatives at which my former housemate/landlady was speaking. (She rocks.) Grew a little despondent over the American way of life as it relates to transportation. Had dinner and drinks at a Marvin Gaye-themed restaurant called “Marvin” that I had heard about on NPR. Received a toy monkey.

Had a great time in Boston with Aunt Kelly. We had an afternoon in Portsmouth, NH, with fellow blogger W. Shedd of The Accidental Russophile (and maybe someday he’ll update it again) and his wife Katja. We went to The Improv Asylum and the Edward Gorey House on Cape Cod, which was super cool. We saw Ani DiFranco in concert, which gave me flashbacks to my emotionally tumultuous late teens and early 20s. Kimya Dawson, whose music was featured in “Juno”, opened for her. We ate lots of good food and went to the Apple Store and played with iPhones.

Now I’m in DC. My old housemate Barbara invited me to stay with her and so here I am, back in the house I lived in from 2002 to 2004, one of the best living situations I ever had. Barbara still has the two cats we aquired while I was living here, Bodhi and Leo, who are the coolest cats in the world. The neighborhood has changed a lot. Gentrification was just getting started when I lived here. Now there’s a Target, a Starbucks, and a Ruby Tuesday’s, among other things. I feel a mixture of appreciation and disgust. I’m staying in my old room, which gives me flashbacks to my emotionally tumultuous mid-20s. But really, it’s a great room and a great house and a great neighborhood and it’s great to be back for a few days.

I’m off to Boston tonight and then to DC on Tuesday. If you’re in one of those places, get in touch!

Yesterday was my first 4th of July in the US in four years. We started the day with blueberry pancakes at a nice little café with a slightly overbearing proprietor who, upon hearing that I had worked as an English teacher in Russia and Sweden, tried to persuade me that it would benefit the world much more if I worked at a for-profit American school in Gaza that he helped found. While I have sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, I also have sympathy for the plight of the Israelis (not to mention the fact that Kostia’s brother lives in Israel), so I can’t say that Palestine is going to be my next big cause. I also can’t see how working in a for-profit school would contribute to the greater good. Oh well. It’s a nice café anyway.

We went to the Independence Day parade in Canandaigua, my dad’s hometown and the place where I’m spending most of this month. Here are some pictures. 

In the spirit of American democracy and bad fashion, I wore my new ill-fitting Obama t-shirt to the parade, hoping to irritate some Republicans. I think I achieved my goal.

Marching band. This was about the only one, surprisingly, though there were bagpipers…

There was all kinds of culture, including the South Bristol Cultural Center, which, according to their banner, celebrates culture. That sounds pretty vague to me…

Good old Uncle Sam on a Vespa

Patriotic fashion…

… which is not as cute on older people:

There were classic cars to make a Dalarna County redneck drool

And classic fire engines too.

 
After the parade we wound up on an impromptu wine tour, if two wineries can be called a tour. Those of you not from Upstate New York might be surprised to know that western New York state is a wine-producing region. Too bad for my grandpa, who has lived here for all of his 89 years, yet is a teetotaller. I wonder how many wine tours he’s been dragged on in his life.

It was decided we needed to pose in front of this barrel

View of Canandaigua Lake

And a vineyard

And a winery that I really liked - both the atmosphere and the wine

In the evening we went to the fireworks on Canandaigua Lake. It was a great fireworks show, but I’m not sure that arriving an hour and a half early to find parking and then taking an hour and a half to get out of the post-fireworks traffic jam was worth the 20 minutes of visual entertainment. Oh, the things we do in the name of tradition.

1. The New York Times. Print edition. Especially Sunday.

2. English muffins.

3. Making small talk with strangers without having to think about what I’m going to say and whether it’s grammatically correct. And oh, do Americans love their small talk.

4. Heat and humidity. Yes really.

5. NPR (but then again, I listen to NPR on the internet anyway).

6. Not having to convert prices in my head to dollars to fully understand if something is overpriced or not (though now I find myself converting from dollars to Swedish crowns - “Would I think this was expensive if I was in Sweden?”).

I’m in Upstate New York, USA. It is warm and humid. Humidity is such a novelty! I will write more soon, but I’m a bit sleepy at the moment. It’s 9pm here - I think it’s late enough that I can sort of start getting ready to go to sleep without being too much of a loser, especially since I want to go jogging in the morning and have coffee with my grandpa, who gets up at 6am.

They had a carnival in our ghetto and the parade went past our door.

I baked some gourmet pizzas. The one has caramelized onion, spinach, and mushrooms, the other has this beet pasta sauce. I love the stuff but am bored of pasta, so that’s why I started investigating pizza dough.

We went to Uppsala for midsommar, the Scandinavian solstice festival. There was folk music and dancing around maypoles at Old Uppsala

I liked this fountain in Uppsala proper

The Linneaus botanical garden

On the night of the solstice I made Kostia and Dima go for a walk at 1:00 a.m. If you know me, you know that it took a supreme effort to stay awake and leave the house at that hour, but it was worth it. Here you can see the transition from dusk to dawn at 1:30 a.m.

That’s Dima

Finally, today was an historic day because Kostia cooked something from a recipe. We have several cookbooks in German that we inherited from Claudia when she moved away. Kostia wanted to keep the cookbooks, but since I don’t know German I told him he had to use them or else we had to give them away. So, he finally got around to it and made a very tasty zucchini frittata.

(Soccer, for those of you in North America.)

Russia has made it to the semifinal of the Euro Cup, which is a super big deal. Just making it to the quarterfinal was a really big deal. Russia hadn’t even made it that far in post-Soviet history. (The Soviet Union made it to the final in 1988.)

Kostia and I were on a train for most of the duration of the game. I listened to it on the radio when reception allowed, and Lenka SMSed me the score when it didn’t. It was very exciting. I don’t even know why I care, except that I can imagine exactly what it is like on the streets of St. Petersburg at this moment - full of drunk, happy people, on the whitest of the White Nights. (edit: Oh, and also because it’s fun to root for the underdog.) I kinda wish I was there.

My life has been so much better since I uninstalled Internet Explorer from my laptop. So I’m happy to promote Firefox Download Day, an attempt to set a Guinness world record for downloading, with the newest version of Firefox. More info here: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

I’ve been lazy about writing about Budapest because I didn’t have it in me to sort through the 150 photos we took there and choose the best ones. Kostia did, however, and you can take a look at his blog, where he mostly writes about this lovely little cafe where we spent an evening drinking white wine and eating fresh bread. They had live jazz and shelves with homemade pottery, jam, wine, and other delicacies for sale.

Here are some photos that didn’t make it onto Kostia’s blog.

This photo is dedicated to Veronika, who has a thing for parking

Ronald Reagan, blya

The parliament building was impressive, but I’m not sure it was worth waiting in line for so long in the hot sun to go inside. You only get to see four rooms.

Movie poster for “Szex es New York” in the metro. I should have taken a picture of the metro cars, they are the same ones as in St. Petersburg and Moscow - and perhaps in the entire rest of the former Eastern Bloc?

We climbed to the highest point in Budapest…

…after which we were happy to have a refreshing swim in the indoor swimming pool at the Gellert Baths. We didn’t take advantage of any of the other options, like hot tubs, saunas, outdoor pools, and massages.

On Kostia’s blog you can see another place we went, Memento Park, an outdoor museum of the communist era, which was a bit anticlimactic - I was expecting something much bigger. And we had quite an adventure getting there, as we took bus #7A to its end somewhere in the middle of what Russians would call “the sleeping districts” instead of the #7 which goes to the intercity bus station from which the bus to Memento Park departs.

In general, it was a great trip. Hungary is the first former Eastern Bloc country that I’ve visited outside of Russia. There were a lot of things there that reminded me of St. Petersburg in a nice way - the architecture, the products in the supermarkets, the little 24-hour shops with cheap alcohol, the public transportation, the oversized pillows - but it is a much cleaner and friendlier place than SPb. And unlike SPb, very affordable for tourists. They don’t seem to operate under the principle of “charge them as much as humanly possible”. Certainly, lunch in a touristy restaurant costs at least twice as much as at a restaurant for locals, but at 6 euros it’s still pretty reasonable. Highly recommended.